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October 8, 2007

This is your brain on religion

It's been a busy week for those who study how the brain deals with religious experiences.
Tikkun magazine, in their piece Neuroscience and Fundamentalism speculates on many things, most interestingly that "[a]n individual with frontal lobe injury or dysfunction can display a very curious behavior: They may have trouble letting go of people and things and will reflexively touch and grasp even when inappropriate...Such physically adherent or stuck behavior is an outcome of the person’s inability to reason divergently. Could practicing fundamentalism unconditionally be a mental equivalent of this physical behavior?"

Slashdot has a discussion, Scientists Deliver 'God' Via A Helmet, about a Scientific American piece on a “God helmet,” which generates weak electromagnetic fields and focuses them on particular regions of the brain’s surface that creates a euphoric experience of someone being in the room.

The Philadelphia Inquirer discuss a new book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul which challanges these sorts of studies in their review A response to atheists, materialists. Neuroscientist's a soul man, says it's more than matter.

Neuroscience is a combat zone. It is here, in the human brain, that the final conflict between materialism and, to invent a word, soulism is being fought. For materialists, the outcome is not in doubt. Our minds, our selves, our awareness are merely the outcome of the electrical activity of the few pounds of hyperconnected matter between our ears. All claims to the contrary are wishful thinking or superstitious remnants.

But the materialists have two problems. Their certainty of victory is, for the moment, a leap of faith. There is no clear scientific consensus on how the brain produces the higher functions we call being human. And, second, the great mystery, the ultimate hard question, remains: How does matter produce mind, how can it? Irrespective of religious belief, immaterialism cannot easily be dismissed. What is the nature of what I am thinking and feeling now? To tell me that it is all a by-product of my brain is to tell me nothing. What I am is at least as real as the chair I am sitting on, and what I am seems to be immaterial.

Hard scientists and militant atheists tend to dismiss this as spilt religion or philosophical hair-splitting, a futile pursuit of an artifact of language. But all serious thinkers understand the problem. Most, however, will fall back on what the philosopher of science Karl Popper called "promissory materialism." We will, one day, find the material answers because, in essence, we must. There simply cannot be anything other than matter.

This book is an attempt to show that, even in terms of the most rigorous science, this cannot be true. Based, in part, on his study of brain activity in Carmelite nuns in the course of their deepest religious experiences, Mario Beauregard claims it is simply not possible for the matter of the brain to be all that is involved....
None of which devalues the overall message of this book. The materialists, reductionists and militant atheists have not done what they claim to have done, and Beauregard performs an admirable service in explaining why. Above all, he shows that our current science is provisional and as far from answering final questions as science has always been.

Posted by OneEyedMan at October 8, 2007 2:03 PM

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